In Reply to: Likely voters lean more Democratic for November's midterms, a cha posted by mh on July 23, 2026 at 09:21:59
Every month, our Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll is weighted so that the people responding match demographic targets from the Census Bureau (on things like age, race, metropolitan status, and education) and partisan targets from two sources. One is the results of the 2024 election (something polling nerds call “weighting by past vote”), which provides a target for both (a) how many adults are voters and (b) among those voters, how many are Democrats, Republicans or independents. The other is a running three-year average of the party identification distributions from Pew Research Center’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey, or NPORS — one of the highest-quality surveys of U.S. adults that also has a very high response rate. As the name suggests, pollsters use the NPORS as a reference point for what the partisan makeup of the country actually looks like.
My agreement with Verasight (a smart, mixed-mode pollster that does all my polling) is that they get to make all the methodological decisions for our poll while Strength In Numbers drafts question wording and response options. This firewall between editorial and the data-generating process behind the poll is intended to shore up public trust in my reporting; I literally can’t tilt the poll methodology to give me numbers that are more convenient to publish.
But all weighting choices generate a certain amount of uncertainty for polls, and I want to be transparent with readers about how the conventional approach to weighting by party identification could be shaping polling results. This affects poll results for every firm that weights by party ID.
The big question is this: Who counts as a Democrat, Republican, and independent?
There are several ways to answer this question, and each has an impact on a pollster’s results. As we’ll see, Verasight’s data actually fares very well on sensitivity to weighting choices — much better, by comparison, to some other non-probability data collected before the 2024 election.